Additional Info

A PC with webcam or similar device with internet connection for online collaboration.

Procedure:

This is a simple exercise to lift people out of habitual thought patterns, and to encourage deep evaluation of personal aims, values, purpose and meaning.

For groups of any size. Encourage post-activity feedback, review, sharing and discussion (or not), as appropriate, depending group/teams size, facilitators and time available. Encourage and enable follow-up actions as appropriate, dependent also on the situation and people's needs.

Ask team members: "Imagine you are dead - you've lived a long and happy life - what would your obituary say?"

Alternatively/additionally ask the question: "How will you want people - your family and other good folk particularly - to remember you when you've gone?"

Modern day-to-day life and work for many people becomes a chaotic fog, in which personal destiny is commonly left in the hands of employers and other external factors. It is all too easy to forget that we are only on this earth once. We do not have our time again. So it is worth thinking about making the most of ourselves and what we can do, while we have the chance.

Focusing on how we would want to be remembered (who and what we want to be, and what difference we have made) helps develop a fundamental aim or idea from which people can then 'work back' and begin to think about how they will get there and what needs to change in order for them to do so.